Sec.
Your father’s not at home?
Clara.
No.
Sec.
I’ve brought good news. Your brother, Miss—Oh, Clara, I can’t go on talking in this stiff way to you, with all the old tables and cupboards and chairs around me; my old acquaintances, that we played among when we were children. Good-day, you there! (Nodding to a cupboard.) How are you? You haven’t changed.—I should think they’d put their heads together and laugh at me for a fool if I don’t call you “Clara” as I used to.[D] If you don’t like it, just think—“The poor chap’s dreaming, I’ll wake him up—I’ll go up to him and show him (with a toss of head) I’m not a little girl now”—that was your mark when you were eleven (pointing to a mark on the door)—“but a proper grown-up, that can reach the sugar when it’s put on the side-board.” Do you remember? That was the spot, that was the stronghold, safe from us, even when it stood unlocked. When the sugar was there, we used to play at catching flies, because we couldn’t bear to let them, flying about so merrily, get at what we couldn’t reach!
Clara.
I thought people forgot all those things when they had to study hundreds and thousands of books.
Sec.
They do forget! I wonder what don’t people forget over Justinian and Gaius! Boys, that kick against the A B C so obstinately, know why they do it. They have a sort of feeling that, if they leave the spelling-book alone, they’ll never get at cross-purposes with the Bible. It’s disgraceful how they tempt the innocent souls with the red cock, and the basket of eggs, till they say A of their own accord—and then there’s no holding them! They tear down hill from A to Z, and on and on, till they are in the midst of Corpus Juris and realise to their horror what a desert they’ve been enticed into by those curséd twenty-six letters, which they first used in their play to make tasty, sweet-scented words like “cherry” and “rose.”